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Why Building A Gaming PC Is Like Owning A Gun

Okay, take the headline with a pinch of salt. For one thing, I don’t actually own a gun. But I just finished building my first gaming rig in five years, and there’s something about putting all the pieces together that must feel a little bit like owning a gun.

I’ll do my best to explain.

I don’t come to this conclusion (supposition?) simply because there’s a feeling of power that comes with putting together a super-fast gaming PC. There’s also a sort of simple elegance to it that’s at once totally geeky and actually quite beautiful.

In fact, there’s not much to building your own computer. You’re not really building anything at all – the motherboard and GPU and processor and RAM and all the rest come fully manufactured.

More accurately, you’re simply piecing it together. Lovingly, with care, and after much research and drooling over parts you likely can’t afford.

How is this like owning a gun?

Again, I can’t really say anything for certain. I can only imagine. I can do my best to guess what a gun owner must feel when they take apart and piece back together a rifle, or head out to the shooting range.

Here’s the thing about guns: in an age of planned obsolescence, they’re built to last.

What else can you buy that’s going to work as well in thirty or forty years as it does today? Cars start dying the moment you drive them; most everything else we just assume is going to break before making its final pilgrimage to junk-Mecca.

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Building your own PC is a heck of a lot cheaper than buying a pre-built one, plus of course since you put it together you can replace any damaged or outdated parts yourself. Rather than having to pay someone else to do it.

Of my last 4 PC’s only 1 was built for me, the others were either built by me or I ended up switching everything but the mother board out at least twice.

The downside to being able to do this, is that as soon as you tell your friends you built your own PC half of them will ask you to do the same for them.

Yeah, I suffer from the same problem. I have a couple of particularly computer-illiterate friends who were mightily impressed when they heard I’d built a PC from scratch. Funnily enough they now seem to think that makes me the all knowing computer guru for this corner of the planet. Even when it comes to fixing software issues, which has precisely nothing to do with building a PC. As if knowing how to apply thermal paste qualifies you to fix every recurring BSOD they have…

I’m too lazy to completely assemble a computer from parts right now, so I just bought a PC with a great motherboard and mediocre graphics card, then replaced some parts. The whole rig only ended costing about $1300 for everything, which is good enough for me (it met my personal standard of being able to play Starcraft 2 on “Extreme” graphics settings).

Eric I have both built PCs and own guns, of which one is 100 years old and shoots wonderfully, and building a Pc is nothing like owning a gun. I think you have a strange perception of owning a gun and highly suggest, now that you’ve experienced Pc building, you go out and buy a gun and shoot it. They are both very rewarding experiences but very different.

I would say building a gaming Pc is the nerd equivalent of building a racing motor. The feeling you get when the motor first starts and you rev it up is very similar to the feeling you get when you first see the splash screen as the Pc boots. Yeah now I’m reflecting back and they are very similar.

Lance, yeah see, I’m less interested in whether or not building a PC is *actually* like owning a gun, and much more interested in discussing why building something is similar to things that last – how the act of doing something can have its own immortality, even transforming a piece of equipment that can’t itself last anywhere as long as a gun into something that actually does last, in some ways, forever.